Current mobile communication systems and devices, such as cellular networks and phones, permit users to receive updates for people, news sources, and other entities. Typically, these systems and devices provide updates for every person or other entity listed by the user, such as all of the people on a user's contact list and all the news feeds to which a user subscribes.
More and more, however, users' contact lists and news feeds may include many, many entities and receive many, many updates. Some users receive hundreds of updates a day from people on their contact lists and dozens more from news feeds.
The sheer number of updates received is often more than a user can keep up with. A user may receive updates for 100 different contacts (e.g., those on a “friends” list common to social-networking websites). Many people do not have the time or the interest to wade through all this information. Yet users often feel social pressure not to remove people from their contact lists. Removing or refusing to accept a new “friend” to a contact list is often considered rude.
Furthermore, many users receive too many updates from information sites, such as news and sports sites. A user may subscribe to a sports website but really only want up-to-date information on one team, even though he or she may want updates for other teams once in a while.
Further still, these updates may tax the resources of current mobile communication systems and devices. Current communication systems may use significant communication bandwidth to provide so many updates to a user's mobile device. Current mobile devices may use significant power to receive these updates as well, which may drain these devices' batteries more quickly than users may like.